Why Modern CROs are building Market Intelligence Teams

An article for Executives responsible for revenue and growth, exploring why Market Intelligence is the key to helping inform and drive sales strategies.

We’ve all felt the despair of seeing an overflowing inbox despite our best efforts to stay on top of all the messages we receive. On average, buyers receive 11 cold emails a day that they are aware of, meaning the inbox has become a graveyard of sales communications.

You don’t have to look far before you find remnants of awful sales templates, all too often coming across a “Hey, [First name], Good to read about [Company name], would you like to buy [Product]?”

Inboxes (and their users) are overwhelmed and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to extract the relevant sales approach that genuinely meets your needs. It’s likely when you get a positive response to one of your sales outreach, you share it around the team for others’ inspiration. But when first impressions have such a huge impact on buyers, the best salespeople are constantly ensuring that they’re putting their best foot forward the first time around. Smart CROs are therefore right to treat the inbox as a tool to protect.

So, what is the unknown cost of a bad outbound lead generation strategy to a sales team?

Almost all (94%) buyers confirm that their experience with the selling process influences their perception of both the individual they’re buying from and the company’s suitability as a long-term business partner. To put it simply, bad outbound is damaging your chances of selling in the future.

Did you know?

People are susceptible to negativity bias, which is a tendency to focus more on negative information or events. This means that negative aspects of our environment or experiences often dominate our perception. We also tend to dwell on these events for longer periods, meaning for buyers who have a negative experience during the sales process, it’s likely going to influence their decision making in the long term.

The death of spray and pray

Spray and pray (prioritising volume over relevance) has dominated our outbound lives. If you throw enough darts at a dart board, you might occasionally hit a bullseye, but more often than not you’ll miss your target completely and burn relationships in the process! Since the cost of spray and pray has been relatively low, it’s remained a viable approach for sales teams.

However, there is a rebalance happening, and the new anti-spam measures are taking hold. New Google and Yahoo anti-spam upgrades have been named one of the largest defence upgrades in recent years. It uses AI to detect and flag spam emails, which previously would have got through Gmail defences.

Increasingly, smart CROs are seeing the customers’ inboxes as a part of the communication network. Salespeople should therefore be caring for it and protecting it, not exploiting it through easy, minimum effort communications.

Anti-spam regulations are a good way for sales teams to align themselves with better go-to-market practices that generate demand without wastage. Buyers want salespeople to know them, their business, their challenges. They want salespeople to tell them what they need before they know themselves. In fact, 81% of decision makers report they’re more likely to complete a purchase if the seller demonstrates an understanding of them and their business, across all sales brackets.

More broadly, the top three things that buyers look out for from their salespeople are:

building a long-term relationship

Demonstrating industry knowledge

Proactively identifying problems

However, sales targets and buyer expectations are being pitted against one another; 87% say pressure to hit targets prevents them from tailoring outreach as much as they would like. In reality, they sit side-by-side.

Did you know?

Sales teams struggle to find the time or resource to conduct more prospect research, despite clearly understanding the benefits. Here at AMPLYFI, we call this the research execution paradox: the research stage consists of understanding who to reach out to, why, and what messages to use, and the execution stage means conducting the outreach, building relationships and following up. The more valuable research conducted, the more tailored and effective the execution stage will be.

Sales meets Market Intelligence

AI-powered platforms are primed to revolutionise knowledge gathering that will ultimately change the face of sales for the better. However, while generative AI tools can help with personalising communications, this personalisation is only as good as the market intelligence that drives it.

It’s time we move beyond the typical introduction ‘Hey [insert name], I’ve been following [insert company name] for some time now, and really like your piece on [insert blog post].’ Market intelligence can give salespeople valuable insights into the business, like strategic plans, financial headwinds, changes to regulation or broader market forces that they need to react to.

That is why sales people and market intelligence analysts should work side by side. Combined, they can understand market trends, translate them to customer needs, develop account research that drives account planning and reach out at the right time with the right message.

With the right tools, market intelligence can access untapped resource to help inform and drive effective sales strategies, leveraging the entire datasphere (including the deep web) to identify critical information relating to each prospect and their industry. The CROs that facilitate this partnership will remain one step ahead of competitors and leave the inbox graveyard behind.

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Download today and discover:

Email’s true place in the modern sales landscape: What’s next after ‘spray and pray’?
The cold, hard truth about cold calls: Are you wasting valuable time trying to reach gatekeepers?
How to get better results: Which channels are actually getting noticed?